No decent skins

Up North for the Twelfth of July celebrations during the week, I found myself taking Mic Moroney's advice on Wednesday's Arts page to "cock the head sideways and tune in to the melodies" of the Orange bands. My neck got tired after a while - it's not easy to walk a parade route with your head sideways - but I stayed tuned. And although I lack the musical training to know if any of the airs were, as Mic wrote, Irish jigs "squared off into march time from 6/8 to 2/4", at least I could hear them, thanks to the absence of Lambeg drums.

As the article also pointed out, the Lambeg can produce 120 decibels of sound, "the equivalent of a light aircraft or a pneumatic drill". This is too noisy even for drummers, many of whom have the Irish Army's acuity of hearing; and the Lambeg has been gradually replaced by base drums which, from my experience on Wednesday, can't produce more than 115 decibels at a time. The relative decline of the Lambeg seems to have mirrored, and in a real sense added to, the peace process. It's true that many cross-community cultural events of recent years have featured symbolic meetings of the Lambeg and bodhran; but the general drift has been away from percussion (and indeed many would argue that we need to take all the drums out of Irish politics).

The general point of Wednesday's article, that Orange bands are closer to Irish traditional music than they've been letting on, doesn't surprise me. The whole loyalist/nationalist thing is only a minor squabble compared with the deep-seated hatreds that, in the past, have divided traditional musicians among themselves. And even these seem to be on the wane.

Seamus Ennis's famous advice that a bodhran was best played "with a penknife" represented the moderate end of the anti-percussion movement. Indeed, there are fundamentalists who still believe bodhran players are all going straight to hell when they die, unless they embrace Jesus (or something other than a bodhran) quick.

Some feel the same way about guitars, and there's sizable orthodox community which still holds that the accordion is the work of the devil. But I paid a brief visit to the shrine of traditional music - the Willy Clancy Summer School in Clare - last week and, as far as I could see, ecumenism was rampant. Not only did most sessions have more guitars than a 1970s folk mass (one even had a double bass, God help us) but there were bodhrans everywhere you looked.

I make no judgment here about the bodhran, which I know has many serious practioners, some of whom even practise. But it seems to be particularly popular with New Age travellers, otherwise best known for their principled stand against gainful employment (hence the term No-Wage travellers, which is sometimes used). Nevertheless, the attitude in Clare last week seemed to be that all God's children gotta place in the choir, even ballad singers, who are almost fully accepted now in polite traditional music circles.

Admittedly, traditional music festivals are like the Twelfth of July: passions run higher after dark and it can be dangerous to be from the wrong tradition in certain pubs. I wasn't there long enough to observe.

But the general trend in music, in both parts of the island, seems to be towards mellowing - with the possible exception of drumming contests in the North in which, according to the Portadown band conductor interviewed by Mic Moroney, adjudicators who make the wrong move "could end up in a drain somewhere".

That doesn't surprise me either. I don't want to generalise or anything, but it's well known that drummers are all mad. I remember once being at a party, after an event involving a three-piece band, someone's friends. Back in the house, one of them produced a guitar (an acoustic one) for a singsong. Then a second member produced another one, which was still just about manageable in a suburban living-room. But then the drummer decided he'd go out to the van and bring his kit in.

It was one of those awkward social situations. Nobody wanted to hurt his feelings, so we arrived at a compromise in which he played out in the hallway and we partially closed the door on him. Everybody was happy.

MUSIC is all very well, of course. But as my fellow Monaghan man Patrick Kavanagh knew, there's nothing to beat silence; particularly "the tremendous silence of mid-July" which, as you'll remember from your Leaving Cert English, inspired one of his canal bank poems.

So, finding myself near the canal the other evening, and noticing it was mid-July, a thought occurred to me: I know, I'll sit on the poet's seat for a while, and listen to the tremendous silence.

Well, damned if I could hear any. It was past seven in the evening, but the traffic in the area was gridlocked, with tailbacks of cars travelling to the Tina Turner concert in the RDS tangling with other tailbacks of cars trying to get to the opening of Riverdance at the Point. On top of this there were no fewer than four separate digging crews within 500 yards of where I sat, each of them performing a symphony for jack-hammers in four movements.

It was like being in the middle of an eardrum contest, the issue being which of mine would be perforated first. I decided that, on the whole, I'd rather be in a drain. So I got out of there quick (in jig-time, 6/8).

Frank McNally is at fmcnally@irish-times